“Okay.” I pushed the door open. “I’ll call you when I get there. Bye.”
I got into the car and shut the door. Mom and Dad stayed in the open doorway, watching as I inserted the key into the ignition and reversed the vehicle out of the driveway. I gave them a small wave as I put the car back into drive and surged forward.
At the stop sign, halfway down the street, I glanced briefly in the rearview mirror.
They were still there, watching from the doorway, Dad’s arm encircled around Mom’s thin shoulders, the tips of Mom’s fingers pressed against her lips. Sophie and I used to do this thing sometimes, just for fun, where we positioned objects at a distance in between our thumb and index finger. It was a trick of the eye, of course, an optical illusion, meant to make us feel bigger, I guess, than the things that actually were. And this was what I did now, fitting both of my parents—still reflected in the rearview mirror—in between my slightly parted fingers.
They were so small, I thought. Like dolls. Little kids, even.
I stepped hard on the gas and did not look back again.
part
two
chapter
13
Mom was right. Driving such a distance in the dark was probably not the smartest thing to do. As the light began to sink behind the hills and fade entirely from the sky, I tried not to let my nerves get the best of me. The good thing was that the majority of the trip was on the highway. A straight highway. In fact, the first hundred miles, along Route 84, was so boring that I had to turn the radio on loud so I wouldn’t fall asleep. Cyndi Lauper wailed in my ears as I pulled onto the New York Thruway and settled in for eighty more miles of silent road, but after a while, I turned the radio off. The silence, strangely enough, was comforting.
I still wasn’t 100 percent sure what my motivation was for doing this. I did know I wanted to hear Sophie’s version of things. I wanted to stand in front of her and ask her why she had kept Maggie from me. But why I was driving three hundred and fifty miles to ask her—right now, with everything else going on in my life—wasn’t really clear. Why was I letting this weird sense of urgency take over instead of the usual straightforward, calculated way I did things? And how was it that I had just graduated at the top of my class two days ago and now felt as if I didn’t have a clue about anything at all? Maybe in an ironic sort of way it would turn out that Sophie was the one who had a handle on things; after all, she’d spent seventeen years keeping a secret. And a massive secret at that. I’d done a lot difficult things in the last few years—getting a 1680 on my SATs (after taking them six times), receiving the highest score ever on Mr. Phillips’s ridiculously grueling chemistry final—but I’d never done anything like that. And as much as it angered me that she had done it, I couldn’t help but feel a strange kind of awe about her too.
The occasional punctuation of a few red taillights broke up the vast blackness in front of me. A lopsided moon moved overhead, gossamer clouds separating in front of it like milkweed strands. By the time I reached the end of the thruway, it had scuttled to the front, like an enormous blinker pointing the way.
Every time I tried to imagine the impending scene between Sophie and me, I felt sick. I’d seen enough blowouts between Sophie and Mom and Dad over the years to know that arguing with Sophie was not for the faint of heart. Sophie, if it could be said, was pretty damn good at arguing. I had never known her to back down. She held her ground the way a bullfighter waited in front of a bull, fluttering that red cape until the last possible second. And then, just before the charge, she would move, so swiftly that Mom or Dad or whoever it was she was baiting did not even have time to blink. By the time they were ready to face her again, she had settled into another fighter stance, red flag waving all over again.
It was not something I was looking forward to. But maybe, when things finally got said, when details were spread out before us, an argument would not be necessary. Maybe we could just sit there and…talk.
I closed my eyes for a second, trying to imagine it. And then I opened them again.
We were talking about Sophie here, a girl who had once been dubbed by Dad as Miss Darrow, after Clarence Darrow, possibly the most famous trial lawyer in history. He was known for his powerful closing arguments.
Who was I kidding?
chapter
14